1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, and particularly to an image forming apparatus operating according to attributes of a general-purpose file.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent maturing of the digital environment in such places as offices, it has becoming common to computerize documents to be treated. An example of the computerized document data is a PDF (Portable Document Format) file.
To a document data file such as PDF file, an attribute is added for the sake of security. Operations that can be performed respectively on files with respective attributes added thereto differ from each other, depending on the added attributes. As a technique for adding an attribute to a document file, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2004-252784 for example discloses an information processor specifying, for each document, whether printing of the document is permitted or inhibited. Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 06-035907 discloses a structured document editing apparatus holding an attribute for a structure of a document and identifying an editable document structure among structures of documents to be edited.
A digital multifunction device such as MFP (Multi Function Peripheral) may be equipped with a function similar to an operation (function) controlled by an attribute added to document data. In this case, a user has to determine what processing can be performed on a document data file, based on a combination of the digital multifunction device and the document data file to be processed, and then select an appropriate function. A problem is accordingly that manipulation may be difficult where the user does not have an adequate knowledge for making the above-described determination. It is also a problem that an appropriate function of the digital multifunction device may not be used to perform desired processing on a document data file to be processed, if the user lacks such a knowledge.